Portable electronic devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) are commonly used for personal record keeping such as appointments, contacts, expenses and other information. In many instances, it is desirable to transfer information from one portable electronic device to another.
Many portable electronic devices include an infrared (IR) interface for communication with compatible devices, including other portable electronic devices. Thus, these portable electronic devices are operable to send or “beam” information to another device using, for example IrDA, which is a well known protocol using infrared light pulses for data transfer.
IrDA communication suffers from the disadvantage that it is designed for “face to face” transfer of information and is limited to communications within a three-meter line-of-sight range. While this may be acceptable for “face to face” data exchange, the three-meter range is very limiting. When two portable electronic devices cannot be moved within a three-meter line-of-sight range of each other, IrDA communication cannot be effected between the two devices.
Quite apart from portable electronic devices such as PDAs, integrated networks are also known in the art for providing converged voice and data communications using TCP/IP protocol, over Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wide Area Networks (WANs). One such system, the Mitel Networks 3300 Integrated Communications Platform (ICP) delivers sophisticated call management, applications and desktop solutions, including the ability for a PDA user to communicate to a telephone device (i.e. IP telephone) for the control of call functions. In this case, the telephone device acts as a network portal for passing information such as digits from the PDA's phonebook or contacts database to call control software on the network. From the user's perspective, the PDA controls the telephone device. The PDA communicates with the network via (1) the IrDA interface between the PDA and the telephone device and (2) TCP/IP communication between the telephone device and the network.
It is an object of an aspect of the present invention to extend the known PDA communication functionality of such networks to provide an improved method of communication for portable electronic devices, such as PDAs, over a network.